ENOVIA Studio Schema Analyzer

ENOVIA® Studio Schema Analyzer is an administrative tool that customers use to manage their daily schema development and maintenance activities as they implement new releases of ENOVIA or new capabilities on top of their current ENOVIA deployment.

ENOVIA delivers the industry’s most flexible Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment. The functionality included spans the entire product development lifecycle, providing companies with the ability to rapidly adjust business process functionality to meet their unique needs at the lowest possible total cost of ownership. As customers take advantage of this flexibility to modify the business process, it may be necessary to make modifications to the underlying data model and schema. ENOVIA Studio Schema Analyzer enables administrators to be more productive in managing the ENOVIA implementation and performing the activities associated with modifying the ENOVIA schema. This product can be used with any ENOVIA environment including customer-specific implementations. The main capabilities include:

Unified Modeling Language (UML), an industry-accepted standard for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the business model, is a standard function with the ENOVIA Studio Schema Analyzer and enables users to design and define the data model before building it.

Upgrading to a new release and reconciling schema differences is simplified using automatic comparison reports.

With the ENOVIA Studio Schema Analyzer, administrators can compare different schema implementations where they can see and report the differences and make plans to take appropriate actions.

Develop and review schema extensions offline and then synchronize changes back into the database.

Generating schema reports in both Microsoft Word and HTML is easy and fast, saving implementers significant time and effort.

Understand the dependency and relationship between various schema elements to identify where each schema element is used and the impact of changing it

Make schema modifications offline and sync back to the online database only the changes that are complete

Use UML methodologies to view and extend the data model

Compare two separate schema models to rationalize the difference between them and synchronize them as needed

Generate complete schema documentation reports quickly and accurately

Schema Explorer

With ENOVIA Studio Schema Analyzer, administrators connect to the ENOVIA database and extract the publicly exposed and customized schema into a neutral-format local file. The local copy of the schema is then used for viewing, reporting and deciphering the data model. All ENOVIA schema modeling entities like Business Types, Policies, Attributes, etc. are extracted for analysis and comparison. Relationships between the various administrative schema objects are also captured so that the dependency of one schema element with another is understood. At this time, ENOVIA® VPM Central™, ENOVIA® VPM Team Central™, and their optional products do not fully publish their schema.

Offline Schema Development

Making ad-hoc changes directly to a live schema can have a negative impact on the application, especially if these changes are incomplete and completion spans multiple days or weeks. The ENOVIA Schema Accelerator enables offline model changes without impacting the “live” development environment. Once changes are reviewed and finalized within the tool, they can be synchronized with the ENOVIA database.

UML Modeling

UML is a standard practice for specifying, visualizing, constructing, and documenting the business model. With UML functions, project teams can communicate, explore potential designs, and validate new schema requirements. With the ENOVIA Studio Schema Analyzer, UML is a standard function and UML diagrams are created automatically during the initial schema extract process. Each UML diagram reflects a portion of the schema model representing the business type, its type hierarchy, relationships and attributes. New UML diagrams can also be created interactively representing existing schema as well as new schema elements. UML diagrams can then be exported to a database to create or modify the represented schema model as well as exported as gif files for documentation.

Schema Comparison

During an implementation, often times, implementers are working with multiple schema instances; i.e. local and shared instances or development and QA environments. Keeping these schema models synchronized or even knowing if they are synchronized can be difficult. With the ENOVIA Studio Schema Analyzer, administrators can not only compare multiple instances, but automatically update one based on another. The schema comparison tools provide much flexibility in identifying how the comparison should be performed and whether the comparison should be interactive or written to a file.

Simplified Upgrades

Upgrading to a new ENOVIA product release can be simplified with the ENOVIA Studio Schema Analyzer. Implementers can compare the vanilla instance of the new product release to the existing production system where they can see and report all schema differences and make plans to take appropriate actions. The schema comparison reports compare all schema elements including program objects written with Java and TCL code.

Automated Documentation

At the end of the design and development cycle, implementers can easily and instantly generate schema documentation against the ENOVIA system in both HTML and Microsoft Word® formats saving them lots of time and effort. This task by hand could not only take months to do, but is prone to errors. With a simple command, the entire schema report, along with a table of contents, diagrams and images, can be generated.

Nightly Archives

The ENOVIA Studio Schema Analyzer enables users to schedule nightly extracts and/or reports of the ENOVIA schema for archiving purposes. This automation includes extraction of the ENOVIA schema model, generation of the schema report, as well as schema comparison reports, against a previous baseline. The nightly automation can be useful for project leaders as they can track progress against a previous baseline as well as retain archives of the entire schema and documentation.